


Frozen

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: The Authority
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-07
Updated: 2011-08-07
Packaged: 2017-10-22 09:01:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/236364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Midnighter considers ambient temperature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frozen

  
This is the first dimension he's seen where they weren't moving  
through some kind of ocean.  There've been more colours than the light  
spectrum of their Earth allows, and there've been paradoxes that  
boggled even the most perfectly enhanced pathways of his brain, but  
they've always been encased by something resembling liquid, something  
to be sailed through.  Here, suddenly, they're distinctly *elsewhere*.    
Because there's only the thinnest possible atmosphere around them.    
Because somewhere abstractly *up* there's a sky, if an inexplicable  
one without the infinitesimal curve that Earth's -- their Earth's --  
sky has.  Just infinite and silver-flat.

The Carrier, huge as it is, is dwarfed by the ice chasm they're moving  
through.  Whenever they rise or sink in it, he's been able to count  
packed layers, see the blue shades of ice changing.  Two hundred miles  
thick, more or less.  The crevasse is seventy wide.  A river at the  
bottom of the chasm moves with the grace of something not quite  
frozen.

There are trees embedded in the ice.  All of them silver.

He wonders, if he was still human -- *only* human in that very normal  
sense -- whether he'd be cold sitting here in one of the Carrier's  
hundred of transparent eyes.  Half-globes of something entirely unlike  
glass, the eyes are occupied as often as not, even when they're  
travelling in the absolute zero of deep space.  So he supposes there  
must be heat containment.  It must be safe for living things.

He doesn't know.  He's always cold.  But he hasn't told anyone that  
except Apollo, who knew already.

*

He was cold and naked when he came out from under the knife.    
Somewhere in the guts of whatever Stormwatch facility Henry Bendix had  
chosen for the site of that particular moment of perversion, he'd been  
naked and nameless, surrounded by other people who were naked and  
nameless but somehow less deeply *concerned* about those facts than he  
was.  But maybe they didn't hurt.  Their bodies looked like dolphin  
skins to him (and strange, horribly strange that he could remember  
dolphins, remember them swimming off the coast of Texas, but not his  
own name), silver-perfect and unmarked.  Like nobody'd *cut* them to  
make them what they were.

A shimmering gold head bent down intimately close to the dragon-thing  
that Bendix eventually named Stalker.  Gold-lashed eyes tilted over to  
him, where he was sitting with his back pressed against the wall and  
his knees pulled up in front of him.  He remembers that huge body  
walking across the room and looming over him, too naked and too  
beautiful, then crouching in front of him and laying huge, warm hands  
on his shoulders.  Hands that sent a wave of improbable warmth through  
him that he shouldn't have been able to feel, just like he couldn't  
feel, really feel, the ambient temperature of the space they were in  
or the stove-heated metal of the spoon he'd unthinkingly picked up  
yesterday in the galley, thereby adding another scar to the masses he  
already had.

Heart-shattering smile.  Just a brief, 'Hi,' and he was gone, the  
person that Bendix eventually named Apollo.

*

He was cold and wet on some unidentified night in Boise. Idaho, when  
he and Apollo dragged themselves out of the desert, still too  
emotionally ragged to even carry on something like a conversation.    
The first night, he'd chosen north, because it was as good a direction  
as any, and pointed them in it.  The second night, Apollo pulled  
together enough that they didn't have to walk anymore.  Sometime after  
that, they'd entered high mountain country.  And sometime after that,  
it'd started to rain.

It was one of the ongoing miracles of his existence that even in  
uniform, people didn't usually notice them.  Just like there was  
nothing not-normal about a guy in enough leather to choke Batman  
hanging out with a human mountain wrapped in spandex.  His natural  
(unnatural) stealth probably helped them.  But the rest of the time,  
they were just not-there for most people, the way homeless people  
were.  

Nobody in Boise looked at them when they dropped into the wet, dark  
downtown of the place.  Nobody even turned to look at them.  He  
suspected that he could have played in traffic instead of just  
crawling into the nearest alley.

He remembers finally letting himself sag against a building wall.  He  
wasn't physically tired -- he wasn't ever tired, really -- but his  
brain ached and the cold place inside where he'd had human emotions  
once was aching like its tendons had been ripped loose.  He stood  
pressed under the roof's overhang and watched the water pour off it in  
a steady wall.  That transparent mass of hydrogen and oxygen between  
him and Apollo.

Who only looked at him.  Still radiant, even after days in the high  
country with the misery of a murdered team between them.

Ragged, too.  Dirty.  Tired.  Apollo still looked like he might cry.    
Which wasn't as weak as his own brain whispered it was.  It was a  
*human* response.  He knew that.  He was going to have to work to get  
those back.

He must have shifted or something.  Softened his posture, opened his  
arms.  Because after a couple of minutes' silence, Apollo leaned  
through the wall of water and sagged against him.  Buried that  
luminous face in the hollow of his neck and just shook.

He thinks they stayed like that for a long time.  Standing first, then  
sitting, hidden from the street by a couple of dumpsters and a lot of  
bags of trash and the weight of a rain that even dogs shouldn't have  
been out in.  His arms around that bigger body, just hissing softly  
because he couldn't think of any words of comfort big enough.    
Apollo's around him, clinging desperately enough that he could pretend  
that he wasn't scared, that he didn't need it, that he was only giving  
comfort and not taking it too.

Both of them breathing.  Apollo's hair dripped water between his coat  
and his neck.  

Apollo's hands were inhumanly warm against his face.  They held him  
steady while the first fingertip pushed in under his mask.  Like sex,  
that.  Like how he remembered sex being -- that first second of  
violation before you loved it.  Before it was really, really good.

It was still raining on them when Apollo pushed his mask back, and  
touched his whole face, and kissed him.  Very gently, that first time,  
but not tentative.  It wasn't a question.  There was no possibility  
that he wouldn't accept it.

The second kiss was wetter, though not much deeper.  Apollo's mouth  
opened over his, but didn't demand access.  It mapped his face  
instead.  Soft, often-mouthed kisses rubbed along the poorly-mended  
tears in his skin.  Along his jaw and at the base of his throat where  
the unnatural, silicon parts of his brain screamed that he was  
vulnerable and shouldn't be touched.

He didn't count how many kisses got laid across his skin before they  
kissed deeply the first time.  No, that's a lie, but he stored the  
number somewhere deep enough that he can't reach it easily, because it  
isn't fair to either of them for him to know.  But he remembers the  
very bright taste that he found somewhere deep in Apollo's mouth, and  
the strange absence of whisker-burn, because neither of them had  
needed to shave since.  Since.  Since Bendix, he supposes, but really  
just Since.  Because they must have shaved Before, like normal men do.    
He just doesn't have any personal connection to the kinds of memories  
he got to keep, so he has to extrapolate and calculate and guess.

Sometime after that (one hour, three minutes, thirty-one seconds) he  
put his gloved fist through a very dirty basement window and they  
spent their first night as lovers curled up together under his coat in  
a shallow concrete hole that smelled almost, but not quite, like rat  
fur burning.

*

Outside, he sees things embedded in the ice that he thinks must have  
been alive, once.  More alive than trees.  Trapped insectoid things  
that look a little like farmers.  One of them has a tool in its hand  
that could be a hoe.  Like they were overtaken by this ice age so  
suddenly that they didn't have time to even turn their heads.

Apollo says, "Are we taking bets on whether or not Jenny Sparks is  
spying on us?"

Midnighter turns just enough to raise an eyebrow and have it noticed,  
then goes back to staring out the Carrier's eye.  The not-glass under  
his naked belly is unnaturally comfortable, as if the Carrier's used  
to having people want to doze there.  Apollo said something earlier  
about frightening the locals, but there isn't anyone out there who  
isn't embedded in ice.  If he wants to lie around bare-ass naked and  
watch the multiverse unfold, there's nothing to stop him.

And he did check.  Every sense he had crawled outward in the ten  
seconds before he laid his mouth on Apollo's and made it very clear  
that the locals, frozen as they were, could go fuck themselves.

The Carrier's not-glass shell was soft underneath them when Apollo  
curled up against his back and pulled up one of his legs in the crook  
of an arm.  Both of them on their sides, and Apollo pushing into him  
so slowly that Midnighter wasn't sure that he wouldn't just lose it.    
Too many senses, too much input.  Apollo entirely too big and warm to  
be pushing so inexorably up into his body.  To glitteringly remote be  
kissing the side and back of his neck while they made love.  Taking it  
very slow, long strokes, Midnighter occasionally bucking back as best  
he could to get more.

Which eventually he did.  Apollo eased his leg down and let him roll  
forward onto the glass, rolled with him and rode him, hard and deep  
and dazzling in the way that Apollo is even when he's out of view.    
His erection rubbed against the not-glass until he (whimpered) snapped  
at Apollo to help him.

That was good, too.  On his back, semen dripping out of his ass, cat-  
slut sprawled against Apollo's huge chest, getting jerked off while  
they kissed.  Long, deep strokes of Apollo's tongue in his mouth, and  
a couple of good ones that he gave back.  His eyes were closed by  
then, but he's sure somehow that Apollo poured light into his mouth  
with that kiss.  There's so much radiant energy loose in the eye-  
chamber now that they must have been star-bright in the moment of his  
orgasm.

If Jenny was spying on them, he hopes she found what she was looking  
for.

He doesn't get mad at Jenny Sparks, and not just because they owe her  
big.  More because he figures she's suffered more than any ten people  
should have to.  Because people do manage to live for a whole century,  
sometimes, and it doesn't break them.  But they get old, and she  
doesn't, and most people don't have all the suffering of a hundred  
years carved into their psyches.

Maybe it helps if the time marks you.  It might keep you from trying  
to do the missing damage yourself.  In a different life, one without  
Apollo, he'd probably drink too.

Apollo leans over and licks Midnighter's back, very deliberately, from  
his shoulder blade down to the swell of his ass.  It leaves a warm,  
wet trail that feels almost as good as the original tongue-stroke.    
Good enough that his whole body twists to follow it.

"Don't ignore me."

"Bit late for me to start now."  Sarcastic, if only because Apollo  
would probably check him for fever if he forgot to be.  But he curls  
into the offered body and pillows his head on one big, pale thigh.    
Apollo strokes his back and ass gently while the world under them  
compacts itself into new glacial layers.


End file.
